The Perfect Prince of Cool

In this season of scions, enter the most talented, the most ambitious, the most combative

HUD secretary ANDREW CUOMO has never held elected office. But in New York -- where he's about to launch his campaign for governor -- and even beyond, he's already the man to beat.

The plane is small. The closer we get to the plane, the smaller the plane seems. How can it carry us, this sewing machine, this Yugo with wings? I do not like this morning's sky, this thick wet air, this stack of dark-blue clouds. I do not need this chortling, necktied vantz, with his wavy hair and olivish brown eyes, his dimpling cheeks and square white teeth, taunting me.

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"Look at that cloud," Andrew Cuomo says, forehead creased with false concern. "Hooy, it's gonna storm. They bounce like balls, these little planes. Make sure you have a bag to throw up in."

We stuff ourselves inside and we take off. It's loud--a tinny, whining loud, like a milk-shake blender. And hot.

"I thought I heard thunder," Cuomo says as we lift into the clouds. "Clarence, was that thunder? I heard a bang. You hear thunder, the lightning is right behind."

Clarence Day is the seventyish, still-half-asleep special deputy United States marshal in charge of protecting the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, this Andrew Cuomo fellow.

"Might be thunder, Mr. Secretary," Clarence says in a bullfrog rasp, one eyelid barely lifted. "You know, if you go down in a plane on a full stomach, you'll float better. If you go down in water."

Cuomo just stares at me, grinning.

"What?" he says and shrugs. "You wanna live forever?"

The ride smooths out--there is no storm, yet. We're flying northwest from Albany, New York, to Massena, where the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation straddles the St. Lawrence River. There, Cuomo will cut the ribbon on a children's foster home, make a short speech, use a gold-plated shovel to break ground for a new fire station, hand out a check or two, and receive a plaque. A goodly portion of his HUD duties consists of this: dispensing checks, delivering speeches, and getting plaques. So I ask Cuomo about what happens to the plaques. In two weeks of tagging along with him, I've heard him give at least a dozen speeches and collect as many plaques. And one quilt.

"Oh, I've got plaques," Cuomo says. "Oh, boy, do I have plaques. I've got rooms of plaques--the plaque wing, they call it. A quilt you can use--funny, though, a quilt never makes it back to my office. The plaques make it back. The quilt will be gone."

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Just then, we hit a bump, and something in the cockpit starts to chime.

"That's nothing," Cuomo says. "That's just the fire alarm."

There's a word for this sort of fuck-it dash, coined five centuries ago by Baldassare Castiglione, a Renaissance writer and Italian diplomat: sprezzatura. The perfect prince is full of fiery cool--a natural and flowering esprit--transparent and spontaneous, not glib but unrehearsed. He leads with a light heart and a bubbling soul. This zest does not often appear, in public life or private, and when it shows itself, we follow.

Ronald Reagan, for instance, was a shitty actor, a babbling dunce, a hand puppet--but he literally stopped a bullet and, first thing, cracked a joke. That's sprezzatura, baby, and it touches voters on a level far deeper than tax cuts or campaign-finance reform. Gravitas left town with Woodrow Wilson, and sprezzatura hasn't lost a top-dog race since Nixon nipped Humphrey. We elect the guy who seems to wink at death. Sometimes--like this year--sprezzatura plays no part. It wears no shit-faced frat-boy smirk. It doesn't tongue its wife to move the polls. Five centuries ago, Al Gore was a cuckold stableman. George W. was the village idiot.

Andrew Cuomo, forty-two years old and stamped by destiny, knows all this. He feels it in his cocky bones. His instincts are that sharp. His tongue and sword are tireless and quick. He looks good in a suit and tie. He swelters without sweating.

Hey, this vantz could be president someday.

We are the guests this afternoon--a different trip, a bigger plane, another plaque--of the Oglala Lakota Nation at Pine Ridge, South Dakota. The drumming circle has finished the Sioux national anthem, and the sweet-burning sage has been passed among hundreds of folks seated on folding chairs in the shade of branches laid atop posts of white pine. The ground has been blessed, for here will rise a Boys & Girls Club--named Happytown USA, as it was in SuAnne Big Crow's vision, though the basketball star herself will not see it, having died, like many on the reservation, long before her time, at seventeen.

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Cuomo stands at the podium microphone in his purple bolo tie and cowboy boots, lean and tanned and tall. "I bring you greetings from my wife, who is a Lakota sister," Cuomo begins, "Kerry Kennedy Cuomo, who was here with us last year. And I bring you greetings from the president of the United States--William Jefferson Clinton."

The drummers bang a few skins in tribute. Kerry Kennedy was eight when her father, Robert, came here in 1968, months before he died. Andrew and Kerry came with Clinton last year; it was the first presidential visit to any part of Indian country since 1936.

Cuomo tells the crowd about the child of the Tlingit tribe he met in Alaska, a little girl who looked at him before he departed with her elders in a skiff, who whispered, Please--don't forget me.

Such a reference has become a tired trope, a nauseating commonplace for our politicians now, as if each village in America had a youngster poised and ready to thrust a tin cup at any passing blue suit. Please, kind sir, give my papa a good job, give me a hot lunch and a less crowded classroom, and, while you're at it, restore decency and honor to the Oval Office. But here there are no votes, no candidates. And Andrew Cuomo doesn't speak the words so much as wail them--a bluish note sliding downscale each time he ends a phrase, trailing off, bandaging the air with forlorn hope.

"In that young girl's eyes, I did see my daughters, and I did see your daughters, and I did see the sisters on the Pine Ridge."

The people listening fan themselves, nodding in the heat. A strip of cloud hangs dead in the windless sky, as if the circling of the planet has ceased. Onstage, Cuomo's words and hands slice arcs of passion; his still-crisp white shirt shines. The people nod, impassive; they haven't only heard all this before--they live here.

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Later, after the ground blessing, Cuomo stops by Shared Vision Court, where the Army Reserves have built eight modular homes in twenty days on the poorest census tract in the nation, and then heads to a meeting of the Oglala Sioux Tribe Partnership for Housing to celebrate these new houses. A few dozen people sit in neat rows facing the front of a long room, where two tables are placed end to end and the dignitaries take turns at the microphone.

"I am from the government," Cuomo says. "I'm here to help you."

He knows full well that this is a guaranteed rib-tickler anywhere in Indian country, and it does not fail now to draw a rolling chuckle from the crowd. They and Cuomo know that the new homes are eight droplets in a desert of statistical despair--the reservation has a 73 percent unemployment rate--but they also are hard evidence that even the scantest hopes might be realized. Cuomo's deputy in charge of Native American programs--she is the first Indian ever to hold her position at HUD--said that even after mortgage papers were signed and construction on the homes began, the families destined to live at Shared Vision Court were not convinced that it would really come to pass.

Cuomo's return also means something to the people in this room: It is a promise kept, an action more uplifting than mere words. He recalls his first visit to Pine Ridge, three years before, when he told Paul Iron Cloud, one of the elders here, that he would return. "He nodded," Cuomo says. " 'Pardon me if I'm not exuberant with your promise'--his eyes said that. But his eyes also said, 'I'm gonna give you a chance.' How many speeches, how many federal promises--Paul Iron Cloud, with all he's seen, said, 'I still have my heart open.' It starts in your heart and in your soul, in your belief that we can do this. We have to believe it, and we have to tell that to the young people. Take the children to see the homes. And don't say, 'I want to show you a pretty house'--say, 'I want to show you what is possible.' "

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Cuomo's eyes beam as he stands at the microphone. It doesn't seem like work, but he has worked hard to connect, to feed them something good and warm to taste.

Thirteen years ago, still in his twenties, Andrew Cuomo wanted to put low-income housing into a middle-class town in West-chester County, just north of New York City. He had founded a nonprofit named HELP--Housing Enterprise for the Less Privileged--based on an alternative to reghettoizing the poor into vertical slums and abandoning them in a no-man's-land where they'd remain forever suckling upon the government teat. He thought it possible, essential, to mix the poor into healthy communities, to get businesses to provide training and jobs, and to use social-service agencies to help cope with a range of problems that housing alone can't solve: addiction, mental illness, violence.

It could be done, done right. It was possible. They weren't all his ideas, but he--he, Andrew Cuomo--was the macher who'd do it.

So Cuomo submits a plan, and the town supervisor invites him to the high school one night to meet the locals. They have questions about the proposal. It's not an official hearing, just a friendly chat.

Cuomo isn't naïve; he knows the town is full of white ethnics who fled the Bronx to get away from the kind of folks who live in low-income housing. He knows they're not pleased with his plan, but he'll talk reason, make sense of it for them.

On the way out to the high school, Cuomo and a HELP intern pass a Dunkin' Donuts. Cuomo pulls in to buy a couple dozen sinkers.

It's all about human relations, Cuomo tells the intern. They're gonna be suspicious. We walk in, we sit down, we brought doughnuts--we'll start the meeting right.

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When they get to the high school and Cuomo sees the parking lot is full, he thinks first that maybe there's a football game that night. Then it dawns on him what's up.

Leave the doughnuts, he tells the intern. Forget the doughnuts--we have a different problem. Leave the doughnuts in the car.

Seven hundred people are howling for blood in the auditorium. As Cuomo comes down the aisle, an old woman screaming in Italian intercepts him. He can't make out her words, but he catches her drift when she spits in his face.

This will work, he tells the seething crowd. I'll prove it to you. You will see.

Two years later--after suits and countersuits, after gunshots and a suspicious fire at the site, after failed attempts by the town to secede from the county and rewrite its zoning laws--Cuomo shouldered the project through. And not only did it work, it worked so well that old enemies now call the thing a total success, even as they kvetch to reporters unto this day about getting rolled by Cuomo.

That's the Andrew Cuomo story line, with or without the doughnuts: unlikely victory followed by pained yelping. In the first political campaign he managed, fresh out of law school in 1982, twenty-four years old, his candidate--Mario Cuomo, Andrew's silver-tongued father--rallied from almost forty points down in the primary to whip Ed Koch, took the statehouse, made his son a top aide at a salary of a buck a year, and went on to serve three terms. Some New York arms still throb from Andrew's twisting--a bullyboy, some have said, a "vindictive son of a bitch" who's handy with the shiv.

You hear much the same from the lifers at HUD, where Cuomo began in 1993 as the assistant secretary for community planning and development.

"He's a guy who really doesn't want to hear other opinions," one HUDster told me. "It's a very top-down kind of leadership. There's no attempt to find out how other people, senior-level career people, feel about things: It's his way or the highway. He's not gonna let much get in his way."

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In fact, Cuomo has let nothing stand in his way at HUD. He took charge of a Great Society ruin known for its spectacular failures--a textbook case of government turning what was a dire problem into an entrenched catastrophe--hired private management consultants to help reorganize the place, cut four thousand jobs, ran HUD's first-ever audit of twenty-nine thousand properties, attacked predatory mortgage lenders and redlining banks, filed discrimination suits not only against landlords but also against bigots who tormented public-housing residents, battled congressional efforts to starve the agency to death, and won HUD its biggest budgets in ten years.

Not incidentally, Cuomo has issued thousands upon thousands of press releases spinning each and every step, transforming a job that had long been a burial ground for tokens of "diversity"--name one of Cuomo's HUD predecessors and win a C-SPAN T-shirt; name two and you'll receive your very own Community Development Block Grant--into a soapbox and a launching pad. It was Andrew Cuomo who eyeballed Smith & Wesson into a deal on child-safety locks and gun-show sales, Andrew Cuomo who stood with the Million Moms, Andrew Cuomo who continues to fund gun buybacks in direct defiance of Republicans in Congress and the NRA. When I asked for a summary of his work as secretary, Cuomo's office faxed me twenty single-spaced pages.

"He's terribly ambitious," says the HUD source. "In terms of the positions he takes and how he enunciates them, it's hard to fault him. It's just that he's so fucking self-important.

"Oh, and one more thing," the source told me. "Don't ever call me at the office."

It is near midnight local time when we find the Best Western in Rapid City. Cuomo unwinds in the bar with a Corona and a cigar. He began today fifteen hours and three speeches ago in Washington, D. C., but he's still fresh, the white shirt still crisp, the bolo tie still cinched.

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I ask about the bitter things said by his critics at HUD.

"I went into HUD as the government hellhole," he says, "on the theory that if you can make HUD work, you can make anything work. It's not a sexy formula. You had to manage the place. You could've sat there and smiled and made this seemingly defensive case--and we would've been dead. They would've eliminated the department.

"No one argues the goal. You don't have to sell them that it's wrong to have homelessness. The challenge is when they say, 'How do you think you're gonna do this? You want my tax dollars? Explain to me what happened with the public housing and those slums and those crooks at HUD. The place stinks.'

"You come in, you tell the truth--You're right: The place stinks. The civil servants say, 'Whoa, you're criticizing us.' That's right--because it's true. I'm not blaming you, civil servant--it was the managers, it was Congress that passed the laws that put you in place. But if it sounds like a criticism, that's because it is. And by the way, everybody out there knows that it doesn't work. You may not like hearing it, but everybody knows. Actually, I'm getting you something: It's called credibility. And now maybe we can do something with it."

They tell me you're a tough guy, Mr. Secretary, a kidney-puncher, an eye-gouger.

"It was the same thing with Mario," he scoffs. "Italian, New Yorker, they're almost the same thing--aggressive, hard. It's code language. Arrogant. Ruthless. Vindictive. You saw The Godfather--they kill their own, whatever they have to do. Plus, I married a Kennedy--they're ruthless, too. It all fits."

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Too neatly. It's true that Mario Cuomo was dogged by Mafia rumors, but the only barrier between Mario and a presidential bid was Mario. He diddled and dawdled--deferred in '88 to Dukakis, for God's sake--and listened too closely to the arias of self-doubt warbling in his skull. He was the king of New York, but he went down in '94, running for a fourth term, beaten by a no-name called Pataki.

As for Andrew, it's no stretch to say that in New York State--where he's going to run for governor in 2002, although he won't admit it--the split between the New York City liberals and the upstate conservatives plays out in ugly, sotto voce code. But it's also no slur to note that power struggles tend to go his way. A rival for the top HUD post in 1997 was wounded by accusations of fiscal impropriety. Mayor Rudy Giuliani--not above a groin shot himself--had $60 million in HUD funds snatched up by Cuomo in a public spar as he was squaring off late last year against Hillary Clinton in New York's Senate race. And just before Labor Day, Cuomo's staff pounced on the news that as many as ten employees of the HUD inspector general's office--Cuomo and his IG have waged a tooth-and-nail four-year public war--had been suspended for downloading smut at work.

The perfect prince leaves no trail of blood. But the calculus of realpolitik demands more than sprezzatura. You need the stomach, too.

"Hardball?" Cuomo echoes me. "I don't know what hardball means. I articulate strong positions--that's ideological hardball. But tactics--I don't have the power to do hardball tactics. I'm the sitting duck. They use my IG to investigate how many rolls of toilet paper I go through. They want to say that I use government resources to travel politically. They get something, they send it to the special counsel's office. This is the game. These are the stakes. This is how they play. These guys come to kill you."

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I thought I already had heard him in full roar. Not even close. He was preaching to the choir one morning at a public-housing award ceremony in a huge ballroom in the Washington Hilton--Reagan was shot on the sidewalk there in 1981--the climax of a three-day conference. The civil servants were back at HUD's poured-concrete box on Seventh Street, hugging their desks. At the Hilton were two thousand people whose daily lives are spent housing the poorest of the poor, and they stood and cheered Cuomo before he spoke word one.

"I'm the housing secretary," he tells them. "You are housers. But we're about something else, something bigger. If I had my way, we would rename HUD. We would name it the Department of Justice."

He's building slowly, in a steady cadence. From the crowd come hoots of laughter and cries of "All right!"

"Now, we've got a problem," Cuomo says. "Because there's a building down the block that they say is the Department of Justice. We'll rename that building the Department of Criminal Justice"--here Cuomo smiles and ups the tempo and the timbre of his voice--"and then we should be the department of the broader form of justice--social justice and racial justice and economic justice."

People shout and scream. Cuomo shouts back, biting off the words faster and faster, chopping at the air with his right hand.

"The Department of Justice--social justice. Because as long as you have homeless human beings on the street, don't call yourself a just society. I don't care how many people you've got locked up--that doesn't make you socially just and racially just and economically just.

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"Don't talk to me about your stock market. Don't talk to me about how rich you are as a nation now. Imagine when we bring those people who have been left out to the table--how strong we're gonna be. Imagine how sweet it's gonna be to say that we took this entire nation to a higher ground."

They were stomping on the carpet. They were dancing on their chairs. Somewhere, Martin Luther King was weeping. Hell, somewhere Trent Lott was weeping. Cuomo delivered them right over the brink and into ecstasy, James Brown at the Apollo. No doughnuts. It was milk and honey, and it tasted good and warm.

From the Hilton, we return to his tenth-floor digs at HUD, an enormous room--a 5-iron, easy--the grandest office I've ever seen, as befits the man who stands a mere thirteenth in the line of succession to the president, one ahead of Larry King. Everywhere are couches and chairs and lamps and . . . tables? Fuhgedaboudit. End tables, side tables, coffee tables, tea tables, tables galore, each leg and surface burnished to a sheen. You could drop eggs on this carpet from the ceiling and they wouldn't crack. And behind his massive desk, at the far end of a wood-paneled wall, is a door so cleverly crafted to blend with the wall that you can't tell it's a door. Behind this hidden door is Mr. Secretary's official crapper, which I never saw, but I suspect the toilet paper within is embossed with golden fleurs-de-lis. I know the walls in there are filled with plaques.

Near our chairs, staring blindly through his window, sit two busts--of John and Robert Kennedy. Cuomo doesn't make much of the Kennedy connection, but he doesn't need to: Everyone does it for him. Bobby was Jack's bruising campaign manager as Andrew was Mario's. On his first date with Kerry--they got married in 1990--they rode Andrew's Harley to a homeless facility Cuomo had helped build in Brooklyn before he went to work at HUD; on their way, they went by the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Project, which had been Bobby's brainchild twenty years before.

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But marrying a Kennedy didn't make Andrew a Kennedy--Cuomo is nothing if not a New York City boy. By the time Mario moved into the governor's mansion in Albany, Andrew was in his twenties already. He came up in a five-room house in Queens, a guy who worked as a tow-truck driver, who bought and fixed and resold cars and paid his own way through Fordham University and Albany Law School. Now he has a home in Virginia, a mile from his mother-in-law, and he hunts and fishes and boats. He drives a '95 Suburban to tote his three young daughters and a '75 Vette he rebuilt and still works on himself.

"I like to rebuild an engine," Cuomo says. "I like to make it work. I like to make it work better."

That's great, Mr. Secretary, and that was some speech. But let's make news. Are you going to run for governor of New York?

"If I run," Cuomo says, "it's gonna be the same speech I just gave. That is what I believe. And if it's not popular, then I lose."

Are you running?

"I don't want to lose, but the sun would come up the next morning. I've seen disaster happen. I saw it happen to Mario. He had never seen it before, and I had never seen it up to that point, either. But I have seen utter devastation--and you know what? It wasn't pretty, and it wasn't fine, but it was okay. And the sun still came up, and my friends were still my friends. So I saw the worst-case scenario, and it's survivable. But maybe I had to see his loss to understand that.

"There's so much cynicism out there. Everybody thinks a politician is totally full of shit, and politicians don't really want to deal with the media because the media's full of shit. I don't like saying I'm a politician, because politician suggests it is unnatural, or it is practiced or rehearsed. Maybe the politics of the future is not something that is rehearsed, but happens to be genuine. I think people more just want to hear the truth. Give them the truth, the sincere truth as you see it."

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But still you have to get elected. If you run.

"I understand that, and I know what it takes--yeah. But I also want to tell the truth. I may be wrong, but I believe what I'm saying.

"Look, Mario Cuomo goes to run for governor in 1982, and he sits with all the geniuses. The geniuses say, You have to change your position on the death penalty. It's a killer, an 88 percent issue. If you're in the wrong position on the death penalty, you lose.

"He says, Then I lose. He runs with his position on the death penalty, and he wins. Why? Because people did the exact opposite calculation, a total flip of what the consultants said. People said, I disagree--but this guy is sincere, and I value that more than his position on the death penalty."

Fine, Mr. Secretary, but if you're not running, then why am I sitting here with this tape recorder?

"Everything is subject to a conversation I want to have with Al Gore, because Al is a friend first and foremost. I stayed here to help him, and I wanted to finish this job. I believe I really needed this year to punctuate the performance of this place, and I wanted to stay and help him."

Next stop--Albany?

"That friendship is important to me. I want to do the right thing--basic friendship, loyalty, respect."

And then you run for governor of New York.

"I want to have a conversation after November."

And then?

"I'm gonna have a conversation with Al Gore right after November."

Andrew's going to run for governor, right?

"Only God knows what's in your heart and mind. I don't know what's in his heart and mind. I'm not sure what's in mine all the time."

Gevalt. I'm sitting now with Mario, in his office, forty-two floors above midtown Manhattan. It's a nice office in a big law firm, but after Andrew's it's as if we're huddling in a janitor's closet.

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Mario looks good, which is to say that Mario looks like Mario--all nose and sad-eyed pasta soul. He has a dislocated thumb, but he'll be shooting hoops at the gym on Saturday. He's a pleasure just to be with, this statesman, this scholar. Sit with Mario Cuomo, listen, and you get a Western Civ seminar. Galileo and Rabbi Hillel, Adam Smith and Jesus Christ. Lincoln, Nixon, both Roosevelts, Thomas Paine, and the Second Vatican Council. I think he threw Buddha in the mix, too, or maybe he was just clearing his throat.

You think Andrew can win?

"I would take him tomorrow one-on-one. I tape up, I would beat this guy tomorrow. He's a rugby player. Very strong, very strong guy."

So you have no doubt he can win?

"That he can win what? The governorship? No question. No doubt, no. If he ever runs."

He is running. You he must have told.

"What he's saying is, 'I think I'm gonna run. I intend to run eventually.' And he does. But he could always change his mind."

You advise him?

"I don't lecture. He's not the kind of guy you lecture to--I don't even try. I never said, Listen to your old man--I've been there. Because he's been there with me. But if I had to take him aside, father to son, I would say, Look, pal, if you make the mistake of running for office because you think it's gonna be nice to be accepted by people as a leader and that that will reassure you about your own gifts and abilities, that's maybe the dumbest thing that you can do. If you're looking to be lionized or respected, it's the wrong business. Because they'll respect you when you're a whore. And they'll beat you up when you're Saint Francis of Assisi."

Well, he certainly has the sprezzatura to win. If he runs.

"Sprezzatura--how do you spell that? Define it."

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Mario fondles it a minute in his head.

"If the word is intended to mean an optimistic view of possibilities--and of his own possibilities--a positive view of whether he can achieve something, a willingness to try it, and an unusual confidence in his ability to get it done, I think that's right. I think that fits.

"He has that. I did not have that. The presidency, for example. His instinct probably would've been, Great. Why not? My tendency was, Why? And that makes all the difference."

So he's running?

"All Andrew has to do is get up there and tell the truth. And nobody can do it better than he can."

He's awfully good.

"He's not awfully good--he's the best. The best. And he'll get better."

Take my word for it: He's already running, running up and down the Hudson River and the Erie Canal--planes, cars, rickshaw, today a boat--handing out HUD grants and loans and making speeches, Kerry and the kids in tow. The little Cuomo daughters are sweet and gorgeous. And Kerry--Kerry is formidable herself, a longtime activist for human rights.

"He's brilliant," she says of Andrew. "I'm very proud of him."

Andrew has brought no doughnuts, only checks--big, blue checks with many zeros. There's HUD's Hudson River Initiative. There's HUD's Canal Corridor Initiative. For all I know, HUD also has an I'm Not Running Yet But Here's a Few Bucks for Lunch Anyway Initiative. At every stop, there's a mayor, a couple of state assemblypersons, and a congressman or two. And at every stop, Andrew tells the crowd how good it feels to come home to New York.

By an astounding coincidence, Republican George Pataki, New York's current governor and Cuomo's likely opponent in 2002--except Pataki's not officially running yet, either--is on this very day doling out $50 million in state-controlled HUDbucks along the Mohawk River, sniping to reporters about how Andrew's initiatives don't matter "because the policies that he was a part of are no longer the future of this state."

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(The only man who seems nakedly eager to appear to be running for governor of New York in 2002 is state comptroller Carl McCall, a Democrat who has plenty of support--for now. In lieu of checks, McCall has baseball caps with his name on them.)

In Baldwinsville, Andrew drops off nine hundred grand, mentions that it's great to be back in New York, and then gets buttonholed by a radio reporter who asks about the governor's race.

"Who's running?" Cuomo replies.

"Well," the radio guy says, "that's what I was gonna ask you."

"You wanna run?" says Cuomo. "I support you."

The radio guy shrugs. Cuomo leans into the radio guy's microphone: "It's great that the governor is highlighting the importance of HUD's funds to New York State. HUD funds are the funds he's giving out. He's helping me make the point that these are desperately needed funds."

He's grinning brightly, having a good time. He's wearing a lucky pair of shoes, his father's, black leather slip-ons with a gold side buckle and rubber soles. Nice shoes--perfect for when you're on a boat and you also have to wear a jacket and tie and make a speech.

I'm standing next to Special Deputy Clarence Day, watching Cuomo go back and forth with the radio guy. He's good, I say to Clarence. He might go all the way.

Clarence nods. "Save your notes," he whispers. "In a few years, you'll see whether he grew or slipped. You've got the proof right there."

Mario wants the shoes back.

"He's keeping them? Hoooo. Those are my Italian shoes. He didn't suggest to you permanently? He's gonna give 'em back, right? Those are good shoes. Listen--he traded me a rotten pair. He says, 'Here's a pair of shoes for you.' He's eleven-and-a-half D, I'm eleven-and-a-half E. I put them on, I said, 'They're too tight.' He says, 'Soak them in neat's-foot oil, then you get the shoe forms, you put three pairs of socks on the shoe forms, then you jam the shoe forms in. It's like a stretcher,' he says. 'Jam it in and leave it like that for two days,' he says. Hah! He got the better of that deal."

I'm telling you, Mario, the lad has sprezzatura. New Democrat, old liberal, a neo--New Frontiersman with a tool belt and a bolo tie.

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